A call center is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests, usually by telephone. A call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call center, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center.
Additionally, a call center is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call center agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and local area networks (LAN). Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the center are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Most major businesses use call centers to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centers. Examples of this include help desks and sales support.
A call center can be viewed, from an operational point of view, as a queuing network. The simplest call center, consisting of a single type of customers and statistically-identical servers, can be viewed as a single-queue. There is operations research of call centers as well, such as forecasting of calls, determining shift-structures, and for analyzing customers' impatience while waiting to be served by an agent.
The centralization of call management aims to improve a company's operations and reduce costs, while providing a standardized, streamlined, uniform service for consumers, making this approach ideal for large companies with extensive customer support needs. To accommodate for such a large customer base, large warehouses are often converted to office space to host all call center operations under one roof. Centralized offices mean that large numbers of workers can be managed and controlled by a relatively small number of managers and support staff. They are often supported by computer technology that manages, measures and monitors the performance and activities of the workers. Call center staff are closely monitored for quality control, level of proficiency, and customer service. Typical contact center operations focus on the discipline areas of workforce management, queue management, quality monitoring, and reporting. Reporting in a call center can be further broken down into real time reporting and historical reporting. The types of information collected for a group of call center agents typically include: agents logged in, agents ready to take calls, agents available to take calls, agents in wrap up mode, average call duration, average call duration including wrap-up time, longest duration agent available, longest duration call in queue, number of calls in queue, number of calls offered, number of calls abandoned, average speed to answer, average speed to abandoned and service level, calculated by the percentage of calls answered in under a certain time period.
Many call centers use workforce management software, which is software that uses historical information coupled with projected need to generate automated schedules. This aims to provide adequate staffing skilled enough to assist callers. The relatively high cost of personnel and worker inefficiency accounts for the majority of call center operating expenses, influencing outsourcing in the call center industry.
Inadequate computer systems can mean staffs take one or two seconds longer than necessary to process a transaction. This can often be quantified in staff cost terms. This is often used as a driving factor in any business case to justify a complete system upgrade or replacement. For several factors, including the efficiency of the call center, the level of computer and telecom support that may be adequate for staff in a typical branch office may prove totally inadequate in a call center.
Call centers need to use a wide variety of different technologies to allow them to manage the large volumes of work that need to be managed by the call center. These technologies ensure that agents are kept as productive as possible, and that calls are queued and processed as quickly as possible, resulting in good levels of service.
Customer service representatives need a faster and more efficient way to place orders on behalf of a caller, instead of using normal order flow. The present invention provides a solution to these needs and other problems, and offers other advantages over the prior art.